Pages

Using a Word Cloud to Remember Words and Texts

Reading is a great way to improve your vocabulary and develop your knowledge of the world, but if you want to remember what you have learned and keep your vocabulary active then here's an enjoyable activity you can do quite easily.

The activity uses a website called Wordle. This site takes the text from documents or webpages and makes them into word clouds (see below). You can then use those word clouds to help you remember the texts you read.The word cloud above was made by adding the introduction from this page about Shakira from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakira

Task:

Go to http://news.yahoo.com/ Yahoo News has a number of different topics to choose from and the articles are quite short so pick one that interests you

Wordle will create a word cloud of your text. You can then change the colour and print the word cloud or save it to an online gallery.

After you have printed your word cloud, look at the words and see how much of the article you can recall by looking at the cloud.

Try to rewrite the article, or a summary of the article, from your memory using the words from the cloud. It doesn't have to be exactly the same, just try to use as many of the words from the cloud as you can.

I have spotted your blog thanks to a teacher of mine. I am studying something related to teaching and I want to tell you that your webpage is really useful for those of us who are still learning English and try to teach it as well. Quite a variety of resources you have here!I find your blog very useful and friendly, thanks for this nice contribution to learning.

It can be quite helpful to use the wesite wordle. By creating word clouds you have many clues to remember what you have read about.Even tough words might not be organized at all, just with a glance to it you can remember even more of the information that you may possibly forget if you did not save it or write it down.

I loved the idea, since my students are engineering students and when they make presentations, I feel that they could use this as a tool to help them remember the key ideas...but, when I tried to do this, my computer stopped me from opening wordle, saying that Activex would be installed..I mean, how safe is this to try? Help me, I am just a beginner.

Active -X is a standard plugin for web browsers to enable them to view more active / interactive content. It's safe to downlaod and install it, though some content that uses the active-x plugin isn't always so safe, but if you are just browsing educational sites that use it you should be fine.